La Liga to in­tro­duce VAR next sea­son

MADRID: La Liga plans to in­tro­duce video as­sis­tant ref­er­ees (VAR) next sea­son, the league’s pres­i­dent Javier Te­bas said yes­ter­day. Spain’s top flight is the only one of Europe’s top five leagues which has so far shunned the use of goalline tech­nol­ogy, much to the frus­tra­tion of the teams.

While the only use of goalline tech­nol­ogy is to deter­mine whether the ball has com­pletely crossed the goalline, VAR can be used to deter­mine goals, red cards, penal­ties as well as cases of mis­taken iden­tity.

Last sea­son Barcelona were not awarded a goal de­spite tele­vi­sion re­plays show­ing the ball had crossed the line dur­ing a 1-1 draw with Real Betis.

“Next sea­son there will be VAR in La Liga, with­out a doubt,” Te­bas said at a news con­fer­ence in Madrid yes­ter­day. “We are mak­ing lots of progress in meet­ings about it right now and it will be ready very soon.”

On the open­ing day of this sea­son, two other in­ci­dents also high­lighted the need to in­tro­duce the tech­nol­ogy. Sevilla de­fender Clement Len­glet’s goal against Es­panyol was al­lowed to stand de­spite re­plays con­firm­ing the ball had not crossed the line, while Getafe were de­nied a goal against Ath­letic Bil­bao even though Jorge Molina’s strike ap­peared to have gone over the line. Span­ish news­pa­per Marca re­ported on Sun­day that the tech­nol­ogy will be tested out in a King’s Cup game be­tween Atletico Madrid and Elche on Nov. 29, al­though the Span­ish soc­cer fed­er­a­tion (RFEF) could not con­firm whether or not the trial would take place when con­tacted by Reuters.—Reuters